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Message: <blockquote data-quote="knight_isa" data-source="post: 2010007" data-attributes="member: 1434">ArsenalPerpetrated PressISBN 0-9721358-0-4128 pages (8 pages title/copyright/TOC/OGL/index/character sheet)$19.95This is not a playtest review.I was really excited about Arsenal.  There were a lot of "sneak peeks" that grabbed my attention long before it came out and I've wanted to run a Dragonstar campaign for a while, so Arsenal looked like a sure bet.  After all, as it says on the cover, it's "a compendium of magical firearms, explosives, and armor."A couple of things that I noticed about Arsenal almost immediately were the font size and the art.  The font size is huge.  While that doesn't bother me too much for the text, it made the tables much, much larger than they really needed to be.  Oddly enough, the tables in the section about item creation did use a smaller font, and those tables looked much better.  All of the tables should have been in that size font.The art varies from fantastic to terrible.  The weapons look fantastic, and the armor is really good.  Where the variation lies is in the "mood art," as I call it.  Most of it looks like it was done by Juha Harju who has a sketchy, somewhat cartoonish style that strikes me as great in some pictures but looks really bad in others.Introduction. (1 page) Typical intro, briefly discusses technology versus magic and a hybrid of the two called "technomagic." [4]Campaigns. (2 pages) Discusses various types of campaigns in which the equipment from Arsenal might be found.  All of this seemed pretty obvious to me.  [3]Balance Issues. (3 pages) Discusses prices, CR adjustments, and such caused by the introduction of technomagic equipment.  My biggest concern in play would be the CR adjustments, but they seem to be well thought out and will probably work well in play. [4]Classes. (4 pages) Talks about adjustments that a DM might want to make to the core classes to account for technomagic weaponry.  I really don't know why this section was included, as the Dragonstar setting is the only setting that might see wide-spread use of technomagic stuff that uses the core classes (that I know of), and the Starfarer's Handbook did a much more thorough job updating the classes than Arsenal did.  This whole section probably could have been left out without hurting anyone, especially since it is an equipment book, not a setting book. [2]Skills. (5 pages) Brief exposition on bluff and diplomacy, a lengthy expansion/clarification of intimidate, a new skill called repair, and notes about using spot/search to discover concealed weapons. [3]Feats. (4 pages) A number of feats that go hand-in-hand with technomagic weaponry.  Most look good, but there were a couple that probably need to be reworked.  Educated probably needs clarification, and Spontaneous Battery Recharge should be a special feat instead of a metamagic one, for example.  Suppression Fire is a feat that lets you do something that's already available to anyone in Dragonstar.  There are a surprisingly high number of spellcaster-related feats, too.  [3]Spells. (8 pages) New spells, most of which are directly related to the new equipment listed in subsequent sections.  There are a few spells that are listed as belonging to abjuration that should probably belong to conjuration or evocation instead (like overload battery and recharge battery).  [3]Prestige Classes. (4 pages) Includes two prestige classes, the sniper and the gunman.  I generally don't look too closely at prestige classes, so I really can't judge these.  [no grade]Combat. (6 pages) Provides an alternate AC/DR option for classes and armor.  Basically, the AC rating of armor becomes DR and every class gets a class-based adjustment to AC that is similar to save progressions.  This section also talks about various attack options, and with the exception with the section about technomagic malfunctions, is really only useful if you don't already have a setting book that has already done this (like the Starfarer's Handbook).  [3]Firearms & Psionic Firearms. (40 pages) There are several different kinds of weapons, all with fairly clever names (like imprecators, which inflict divine force (evil), or flabbergasters, which inflict Charisma damage).  Each type of weapon is listed in each size, ranging from hold-out pistol to auto-cannon.  The pictures & descriptions are great.  The psionic weapons are really different, as they are actually alive!  The firearms section also includes new weapon qualities (a sidebar names core weapon qualities that can't be placed on a technomagic weapons) and accessories (like tripods & scopes).  My only real complaint about this chapter has to do with the tables.  As I mentioned before, the font size is way too big, and it seems like some of the weapons could have been grouped as they have identical effects.  For example, calefactors, castigators, devastators, and imprecators have identical entries, with differences explained in the text.  Vindicators would have been the same as the aforementioned, too, but it seems they were forgotten for the table.  [4]Explosives. (22 pages) This section gives bombs, mines, rockets, etc. the same treatment as the weapons.  Lots of different effects in lots of different packages.  [4]Armor. (13 pages) High-tech armors and new special qualities.  The armors are listed with both the standard AC and the option DR described in the combat section.  Pretty straight-forward stuff.  [3]Item Creation. (8 pages) Includes item creation costs for mass-produced and home-made guns.  The mass-produced cost assumes advanced in technology to greatly lower the cost.  There are some oddities in the home-made prices, however.  For example, biters (acid), blazers (fire) and chillers (cold) all do the same amount of damage and have the same mass-produced prices.  The home-made prices vary wildly, though, presumably because of the base spell used (acid arrow, flame arrow, and ray of frost, respectively).  It probably would have been better to create a ray of fire and a ray of acid to parallel the ray of frost, just as was done for ray of enfeeblement (the spells section includes a version of this for each attribute).  [3]Conclusion.  There was a lot of potential in this book, and where it stuck to the focus I have few complaints.  In all honesty, since I have the Starfarer's Handbook, I could have done without the sections on  campaigns, classes, skills, most of feats, some of spells, and most of combat.  (There was so much (sometimes nearly identical) overlap between Arsenal and the Starfarer's Handbook in fact, that I'm surprised that the Starfarer's Handbook wasn't credited in the OGL.)  If those sections had been cut/trimmed, the font size reduced a little bit, and the tables reorganized, this could have been thinner (and thus cheaper) or there could have been room for technomagic gizmos that don't fall under the categories of weapons/explosives/armors.Overall, I'd say Arsenal is better than a 3, but not quite good enough for the price to be a 4.  There were an awful lot of cool ideas, but the presentation really could have been better.</blockquote>

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